


META: What was Snoke's deal?

by rexluscus



Series: Rex's Star Wars Meta [1]
Category: Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Meta
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-08
Updated: 2018-12-08
Packaged: 2019-09-14 10:04:09
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 8,481
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16910889
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rexluscus/pseuds/rexluscus
Summary: An essay on what makes Snoke distinctive as a villain, what his plans were, and what he wanted with Kylo.





	1. What was Snoke's deal?

**Author's Note:**

> This meta was originally posted on Tumblr, but I'm posting it here to make sure it's preserved.

Since TFA, I’ve wondered what makes Snoke distinct as a  _Star Wars_ villain. I was hoping he’d get interesting in TLJ, but instead he died. So like, what did he want, besides “to rule the galaxy” like literally every other villain? Cuz that would be boring.

Here’s my theory: Snoke was trying to lock the dark and light sides into permanent conflict so he could become the last and only Force-user in the galaxy.

Let me explain:

## WHO OR WHAT WAS SNOKE?

Haha, okay, I’m not really going to answer this question. But I can tell you what we know. Like Palpatine, Snoke is a chessmaster—he’s constantly saying how things have gone “exactly according to his plan” etc. But those plans aren’t based on Force prophecies, as the TLJ novel makes clear:

> Interpreting visions of the future was a dangerous game. Whether Jedi, Sith, or some other sect less celebrated by history, all those who used the Force to explore possible time lines kept that uppermost in their minds. Those who didn’t died regretting that they hadn’t. Snoke had learned that lesson many years ago, when he was young and the galaxy was very different. These days, what struck him was how much visions of the future left out.

Snoke, we learn, doesn’t value strength nearly as much as he values knowledge:

> …the Imperial refugees’ military preparations had been insufficient bulwarks against the terrors of the Unknown Regions. Grasping in the dark among strange stars, they had come perilously close to destruction, and it had not been military might that saved them.
> 
> It had been knowledge—Snoke’s knowledge.

Basically, Snoke helped the nascent First Order navigate the Unknown Regions by giving them the information they needed to plan hyperspace routes. That, of course, gained him status, and from there, he used his vast powers of manipulation to take over. Rather like his master navigators, the Attendants, Snoke uses his knowledge to calculate outcomes many steps ahead and to manipulate events toward the outcome he wants. The Force helps him gather information, allowing him to see whatever he wants—see far enough into people’s minds to predict what they’ll do, see galaxy-wide events from an omniscient perspective, see even what the Force itself is up to.

So Snoke has some respect for the Force, but ultimately he believes in a mechanistic universe that, if you know enough about it, you can predict—and if you have enough power, control. If the Force has a will, he doesn’t consider himself subject to it. You could say he considers the Force a superweapon, like Starkiller. The problem with superweapons is that they cause trouble if there’s more than one of them, and you wind up in an arms race. But more on that later.

## WHAT DID SNOKE WANT?

Snoke had a plan, and whatever it was, a big part of it involved Kylo. Snoke had been shaping Kylo for a purpose, but so far we don’t know what that was. And Kylo may not either. Kylo thought Snoke was training him up to be a new Vader, after which they would destroy the last Jedi and rule the galaxy together. That’s clearly not exactly what Snoke had in mind. For one thing, there wouldn’t have been any “together,” and Snoke may not have given a shit about the Vader thing except as a fantasy to keep Kylo reaching.

There are other clues that Snoke and Kylo were not on the same page. First of all, Kylo attributes his failures to his “conflict” and looks to Snoke for help overcoming it. But Snoke secretly encourages that conflict even while blaming it on Kylo’s weaknesses. He’s manipulating Kylo, and his strategy is: offer him the promise of approval, make sure he fails by stoking the conflict that holds him back, then withhold his approval and offer another chance to get it, etc. etc. Keeping Kylo perpetually conflicted makes him easier to control—too focused on his own faults to notice what Snoke is doing, and too weak to pose a threat if by some chance he does.

But it’s more complicated than that. Even though he himself has set Kylo up for failure, Snoke says in the TLJ novel that those failures disappoint him:

> Snoke had once seen Kylo as the perfect student—a creation of both dark and light, with the strength of both aspects of the Force. But perhaps he had been wrong about that. Perhaps Kylo was an unstable combination of those aspects’ weaknesses—a flawed vessel that could never be filled.

So it seems as if he wanted Kylo “conflicted” but not “unstable”? Hmm. It’s possible that a conflicted Kylo was convenient at the time, but couldn’t be kept in that state forever. Snoke was trying to shape Kylo into the perfect…something. So presumably, those weaknesses that kept Kylo in thrall to him would eventually have to go. But it’s unclear 1) when he planned for this to happen, 2) how it was going to happen, and 3) what Snoke was going to do with him after that. Another possibility is that maybe Snoke means something different by “unstable” than by “conflicted.” He did not want Kylo to stop being a creature of opposed forces—that’s why he chose him—but maybe he was disappointed that Kylo had failed to  _stabilize_  that opposition. Snoke mentions the “strengths” and “weaknesses” of both sides of the Force and fears he has picked a student with more of the latter than the former. But what does this mean?

This next bit from the TLJ novel gives us more insight into the relation of dark to light Snoke hoped Kylo would achieve:

> But what role the boy would play in the future was less clear. He called himself Kylo Ren, but as with so much else about him, that was more wish fulfillment than reality. He had never escaped being Ben Solo, or learned to resist the pull of the weak and pathetic light, or had the strength to excise the sentimental streak that had destroyed his legendary grandfather. And then there was his most glaring failure of all: his inability or unwillingness to use his power to redirect the course of his own destiny.

So let’s see: Snoke needed Kylo to retain the strength of the light but also to “resist its pull,” which meant stamping out his “sentimental streak,” the light’s biggest weakness. Also, he needed Kylo to “use his power to redirect the course of his own destiny,” the dark side’s great strength. (By the way, what is the dark side’s weakness? Probably uncontrolled passion, another one of Kylo’s flaws.) If he could do all this, he would combine the strengths of both sides of the Force in a “stable” relation to each other. And what would that relation be? The only relation of light to dark that Snoke could imagine would be one of inferiority. So Kylo would have to retain the light in himself, but permanently subjugate it to the dark.

This is kind of abstract. I mean, has anyone ever agreed on what the light and dark sides even are? Well, Snoke’s theory seems to have been that they are complementary “aspects” of the Force that each have their strengths and weaknesses, but in the ideal order of things, the light side serves the dark. I mean, Snoke calls the light side “weak and pathetic,” so what would he see as its strength? Its capacity for gathering knowledge, I think. The light side is receptive; it takes in all the news about the universe. Think about how Snoke operates: he accumulates knowledge, data, information, that allows him to plan many, many moves ahead. Knowledge, he says, saved the First Order and gave him his edge. But if the light side is knowledge and the dark side is power, well—Snoke sees knowledge as an instrument of power, not the other way around. Ergo, Snoke wouldn’t want Kylo to purge himself of the light but to trap it and keep it in submission.

But again, this is abstract. Don’t all dark-side-users do that? It’s not like they lack some of the abilities that light-side-users have, they just treat the Force in its entirety as an instrument of their will. So they do exactly what Snoke says: they use the light, exploiting it instead of respecting it. What was going to make Kylo different from all these other dark-side-users?

Let’s go back to what Snoke calls him: “a flawed vessel that could never be filled.”

Snoke frequently describes Kylo as a created object, as he does in the TFA novel:

> “It is your teachings that make me strong, Supreme Leader.”
> 
> Snoke demurred. “It is far more than that. It is where you are from. What you are made of. The dark side—and the light. The finest sculptor cannot fashion a masterpiece from poor materials. He must have something pure, something strong, something unbreakable, with which to work. I have—you.”

It’s not what Kylo learns, what he does, who he  _is_ —it’s what he’s “made of.” Snoke was making him into something, using “materials” strong enough not to break under a great deal of pressure. In TLJ he also worries about Kylo cracking—of his murder of Han, Snoke says, “The deed split your spirit to the bone.” Again, he needed Kylo to remain a mixture of light and dark, but there was a danger that this mixture would get so volatile that he’d break and spill it all out. He’d be a vessel that could “never be filled.”

I think we should take Snoke literally. I think he was trying to make Kylo into some kind of container. For what? For the Force.

This seems nonsensical—I mean, all Force-users are vessels for the Force, aren’t they? All of them “have” it. Again, how was Kylo meant to be different? Well, what do containers do? They keep things in, so they can’t get out. I think Snoke was trying to gather inside Kylo the light and dark sides of the Force in their entirety so that no one else could use them.

Nobody in previous movies has suggested that anything like this was possible. (I don’t know about  _Clone Wars_  and other extended canon.) But think about how well it fits with other things going on in the sequels. For one thing: Force-use seems to be at an all-time low. There are only four big players left: Snoke, Luke, Kylo, and Rey (and Leia, who’s a bit of a wildcard). How did this happen? Well, Anakin was some kind of focal point for the Force, which is why his bloodline is so “mighty.” And by Anakin’s own efforts, the Jedi and the Sith—who both considered the Force exclusive to a privileged few—were winnowed down until finally there was just Luke, and then Ben. (And Snoke himself, of course.) Snoke, we know, was eager to get his hands on Ben, build up his power, and then destroy Luke. So it kinda seems like his goal was to kill every other Force-user in the galaxy except for one he controlled. Now as far as I know, it’s never been suggested that Force-ability is a limited resource that grows scarcer as one person gains more. But maybe Snoke knew a way to make it act that way.

Let’s talk more about what what Snoke knows.

When he’s explaining how his knowledge of the Unknown Regions saved the imperial remnant, Snoke goes on to say:

> [That knowledge], ironically, led back to Palpatine and his secrets.
> 
> Palpatine’s true identity as Darth Sidious, heir to the Sith, had been an even greater secret than the Contingency. And the Empire’s explorations into the Unknown Regions had served both aspects of its ruler. For Sidious knew that the galaxy’s knowledge of the Force had come from those long-abandoned, half-legendary star systems, and that great truths awaited rediscovery among them.
> 
> Truths that Snoke had learned and made to serve his own ends.

So not only did Snoke have a vast capacity for gathering information and calculating outcomes, he also had some kind of primordial knowledge of the Force, “great truths” that even Palpatine never discovered. So what are they, and what were the “ends” that Snoke made them serve?

I suspect it’s something like this: back before the Force became imbalanced, everybody had the Force. Thus, if the dark and light sides could be brought into true balance and made to co-exist in harmony, then everybody could have it again.

However—and maybe this is Snoke’s extrapolation, maybe not—if the Force can somehow be permanently imbalanced by, say, concentrating itself into one person in whom one side completely dominates the other, then nobody else can have the Force.

Think about it. The Jedi and the Sith were each devoted to one side of the Force; each had a philosophy that privileged one over the other. The Jedi thought the dark side had to be avoided, resisted, contained. The Sith thought the light side needed to be exploited. Both Orders also saw the Force as exclusive to a class of special people. So far we’ve assumed that the rareness of Force-sensitivity is natural, or the “will of the Force,” but maybe the war between the Jedi and the Sith, driven by their strangely complementary ideologies of dark and light, made that happen. For millennia, they went back and forth: one would temporarily triumph over the other, then the other would rise back up, and so on and so forth. Now, we seem to have reached the end of that process: the Sith are gone and the Jedi will soon follow, and the small handful of remaining Force-users are all extremely powerful. Things are poised to go either way: permanent imbalance (Snoke’s way), or true balance (currently unimaginable). Maybe Snoke even knew how true balance could be brought to the Force—which made it vital that he keep this ancient knowledge to himself.

In TLJ, Snoke says something to Rey that’s so weird and unprecedented it must also belong to his secret Force knowledge:

> “Darkness rises, and light to meet it. I warned my young apprentice that as he grew stronger, his equal in the light would rise. … Skywalker, I assumed,” he said. “Wrongly.”

So as of the beginning of TFA, Snoke believed there were two special Force-users, one devoted to the dark side and the other to the light, whose levels of power were connected. This isn’t Jedi versus Sith anymore. This is the dark and light sides embodied in two individuals. He thought Kylo was that locus for the dark side and Luke was his “equal in the light.” As he made Kylo more powerful, he made Luke more powerful too—almost as if they were gathering up the total powers of the light and dark sides. Then, of course, Snoke had planned for Kylo to kill Luke. At that point, perhaps, Kylo’s uniquely dual nature would somehow absorb Luke’s light-side power as well, permanently subjecting it to the dark side inside Kylo himself.

That all sounds batshit even to me, but again, we are dealing with ancient, forgotten truths about the Force that the sequel-makers have made up, so they don’t need to sound like anything we’ve ever heard before.

By the way, you may have noticed I haven’t addressed one big question: as he winnowed down the galaxy’s Force-users to the bare minimum, where did that leave Snoke himself? If Snoke wanted a monopoly on the Force, why was he building Kylo up? The obvious answer is that this perfect Force vessel needs to have light-side potential, and Snoke doesn’t have a spark of light in him. But once he has basically trapped all Force potential inside Kylo, what was he going to do with him?

I’ll get back to that later. Right now, I want to look at what we know of Snoke’s plans and see if it lines up with what I’ve said so far. Snoke spills quite a bit about his plans in the TLJ novel, more than we’ve ever gotten before. When he tells us he took that primordial Force knowledge he found in the Unknown Regions and used it “to serve his own ends,” he doesn’t say what those ends are, but he does tell us this:

> One obstacle had stood in his way—Skywalker. Who had been wise enough not to rebuild the Jedi Order, dismissing it as the sclerotic, self-perpetuating debating society it had become in its death throes. Instead, the last Jedi had sought to understand the origins of the faith, and the larger truths behind it.
> 
> Like his father, Skywalker had been a favored instrument of the will of the Cosmic Force. That made it essential to watch him. And once Skywalker endangered Snoke’s design, it had become essential to act.

Apparently, Luke stood in Snoke’s way because he could also have discovered those “great truths” that Palpatine wanted and Snoke had found, which would ruin everything. If one of those great truths was “hey, it’s possible to give the Force to everybody,” you can see why Snoke would absolutely need to prevent that from getting out. To deal with the Luke problem, he concocted a plan:

> And so Snoke had drawn upon his vast store of knowledge, parceling it out to confuse Skywalker’s path, ensnare his family, and harness Ben Solo’s powers to ensure both Skywalker’s destruction and Snoke’s triumph.

And how did he use Ben exactly?

> He had seen his apprentice’s enormous potential when he was still a child—the latent power of the Skywalker bloodline was impossible to miss. And he had also seen how to exploit the boy’s feelings of inadequacy and abandonment, and his mother’s guilt and desperation to contain the darkness within her child.
> 
> And indeed, Ben Solo had performed the role Snoke had envisioned for him perfectly.The combination of his potential and the danger he posed had lured Skywalker into seeking to rebuild the Jedi. His power had then destroyed all Skywalker had built and sent the failed Jedi Master into exile, removing him from the board just as the game entered a critical phase.

So…wait. Snoke used Ben to manipulate Luke into  _rebuilding_  the Jedi Order? Only so Ben could destroy it all over again? Why was that Snoke’s go-to plan? Why did he need to take Luke “off the board” but not actually kill him? (Yet?)

It must be that he needed Luke. Once that purpose had been fulfilled, Luke could die, but while Snoke’s plan was in “a critical phase” he needed Luke to be derailed and isolated but alive. So what was happening during this “critical phase”? Well, Snoke was building up the First Order’s forces, undermining the New Republic, and training Kylo Ren. I think that last part is the most important. He needed to get Kylo ready to kill Luke, and that takes time.

But as long as Luke was out there, he could still ruin everything by finding those Force secrets and spreading them around. That’s why the map caused such a crisis for Snoke. It was already widely known that Luke may have found the First Jedi Temple, which might contain the secrets only Snoke knew. If Luke had found them, he clearly hadn’t done anything with them yet, but if the Resistance got to him, he might. So the problem was that Luke was threatening to come out of exile too soon, before Kylo was strong enough to defeat him.

You can tell in TFA that Snoke doesn’t think Kylo is anywhere close. Whatever else Kylo has missed about Snoke’s plan, he knows he has to kill Luke, and he’s eager to do it as soon as possible. Snoke strings him along but is clearly more interested in “testing” Kylo—because Kylo isn’t finished, isn’t perfect, isn’t ready to fulfill his role. Remember how surprised Kylo is when Snoke orders Hux to fire on the Ileenium system? While Kylo bangs on about how he can get the map from Rey, Snoke is worried about the droid—so worried that he’s willing to blow up the star system that  _might_ contain BB-8. This goes right over Kylo’s head, but Snoke cares less about finding Luke than about preventing the  _Resistance_  from finding him.

By the end of TFA, though, Snoke has realized that  _Rey_  is in fact Kylo’s equal in the light, not Luke, which forces him to recalculate. When Kylo brings Rey to the throne room, you can see that since TFA, Snoke has altered his plan for who’s going to die and how. He reveals he’s been manipulating Rey and Kylo so that she would come to him and he would turn her over to Snoke. Then Snoke orders Kylo to kill her “to complete his training”—that is, to perfect himself for Snoke’s purpose, whatever that is. (“But,” you may say, “Snoke said he’s going to kill Rey himself.” Actually he says he will kill her “with the cruelest stroke,” which is a modern mangling of Shakespeare’s “most unkindest cut of all”—betrayal by a friend. So he’s really saying he’s going to make Kylo do it.) Snoke makes it sound like he needs Rey primarily to get to Luke, but in fact Rey’s knowledge of Luke’s whereabouts might merely be a happy coincidence that lets Snoke kill two birds with one stone. Luke still needs to die because of what he might know about the Force, but Snoke no longer cares if Kylo does it personally—he says he’s just gonna bomb the shit out of Luke’s island, which, by the way, would also obliterate any secret Force knowledge hidden there.

(Incidentally: that Kylo thinks he’s destined to kill his “equal in the light” explains that amazing look he gets on his face in TFA when the lightsaber flies into Rey’s hand. Heretofore, he has thought his equal in the light was Luke, and he’s totally gung-ho to kill Luke. But at that moment in the forest, he realizes it’s not Luke but Rey. And that changes things! He doesn’t hate this person, he feels some kind of bond with her. What does that mean? For everything??)

In the novel’s version of the throne room scene, Snoke says they have reached his “endgame,” which makes sense—he’s about to end the Jedi, preserve his special Force secrets once and for all, wipe out the Resistance, and complete his “masterpiece” in one fell swoop. All he needs is for Kylo to fire up his lightsaber and kill his equal in the light. He knows, of course, that he’s taking a chance by relying on confused, turbulent Kylo to cinch his plan, but he thinks he has that handled. Here’s why:

Remember how I said that Kylo’s conflict and lack of resolve suited Snoke’s purposes, but only up to a point? In TLJ, Snoke cracks this nut by plotting a cascading series of events that will first exploit Kylo’s weakness and then get rid of it, keeping Kylo imperfect and pliable up to the last second. First, he will use Kylo’s conflict to attract Rey’s sympathies:

> Bridging their minds had been a gamble, one he had weighed for some time. But it had worked even better than Snoke had hoped. It had fooled the girl into revealing Skywalker, but it had also forced Kylo to confront his weaknesses. By eliminating Rey, he would also be excising the flawed, hesitant, weak half of himself.

But of course this is where Snoke fucks up. When Kylo steps out of the turbolift with Rey, Snoke assumes his plan has worked. Why? Because he thinks he knows everything there is to know about Kylo:

> “You think he will turn, you pathetic child?” Snoke asked Rey. “I cannot be betrayed. I cannot be beaten. I see his mind. I see his every intent.”

But he doesn’t. Snoke’s power is all in his perspicacity—his knowledge—but he’s so confident in it that he takes its completeness for granted. His old servant knowledge betrays him. Because, of course, his perspective is limited. From his point of view, Kylo has no real choice: he may realize now that Snoke has been manipulating him, but what’s he going to do,  _not_  seize ultimate power? Besides, if Kylo had come into that room to kill him, he would know, because Kylo is an open book to him, right? But Kylo is not an open book, because Snoke cannot imagine a person who would struggle with the light and intentionally  _fail_. Kylo has never seen his temptation by the light as anything but a flaw. So Snoke’s future vision, although he believes it has been formed on more rational and trustworthy grounds, leaves out just as much as Force visions do. It leaves out why anyone but a total fool would choose weakness over power. Turns out that predicting the future never works no matter how you do it.

People in the sequel trilogy talk a lot about Ben’s future. He has “equal potential for light or dark.” His darkness is always spoken of as a terrible possibility, not a current reality, despite some troubling signs. He chooses the dark in part because people freaked out about his darkness in advance, before he deserved their worry or suspicion. Now Snoke, who deals in probabilities, may have seen Ben as a unique hinge-point in the history of the Force, a true coin-flip whose future was impossible to predict. If Snoke could intervene, he could essentially load the cosmic dice in his favor. (This makes him a nice contrast with Han, by the way, who never needs the odds to be in his favor and who will try something even when he’s almost guaranteed to fail. When he finds Ben, he knows this is it for him, but he tries anyway—whereas Snoke treated Ben as a trump card that would guarantee his victory.)

To go back to an earlier question: if Snoke’s plan had worked, what would he have done with Kylo? At the moment when he thinks Kylo is about to fulfill his destiny, he says:

> Snoke had been surprised, but pleased. Master and apprentice had work ahead of them, and Kylo—that endlessly conflicted mixture of light and dark—had finally found himself.

That “work,” I guess, would have been using their Force monopoly to dominate the galaxy, with the First Order providing the necessary infrastructure and bureaucracy. But it also seems like Snoke would be too smart to repeat Palpatine’s mistake and keep his super-powerful apprentice around, no matter how loyal he seemed. Snoke complains about Kylo’s failure to “use his power to redirect the course of his own destiny,” but by all rights, Snoke shouldn’t want him to do that, unless he assumes Kylo would redirect it wherever Snoke pointed. The irony, of course, is that Kylo does redirect the course of his destiny, right over Snoke’s head—not by committing to the dark side but by using what Snoke would consider his weakness. That this “weakness” could be stronger than Snoke himself is the one outcome Snoke couldn’t see in his vision of possible futures.

But regardless, Snoke would have to keep Kylo believing that the “course of his destiny” aligned with Snoke’s interests, which would take work and attention. He does it successfully throughout TFA but inexplicably drops the ball when he brags to Rey about manipulating Kylo. The novel says he can feel how upset Kylo is but doesn’t think it’s important. Why? Snoke says he doesn’t fear betrayal because he can see Kylo’s intentions a mile away, so if Kylo started to form intentions contrary to Snoke’s wishes, Snoke could simply redirect them by manipulating Kylo in the usual ways. And yet—if Kylo truly mastered himself, would he not become impervious to manipulation? Either way, the fact is: if Snoke wants to limit access to the Force, then he’d want to limit it all the way down to himself, not to Kylo. So sooner or later, in Snoke’s master plan, Kylo’s gotta go.

Here’s one possibility: TLJ and its novelization take pains to point out that Snoke is physically frail. So maybe once Kylo had perfected himself, Snoke planned to take over his body. That “masterpiece,” that “vessel” Snoke crafted would ultimately hold himself. But I dunno.

## WHAT HAPPENS NEXT?

One last big question: does Kylo share Snoke’s secret knowledge? Does he know that killing Luke/Rey/whoever will turn him into some kind of cosmic lockbox for the Force? I’ll bet he does know, and I’ll tell you why. It would give him exactly what he’s been missing this whole time: an actual reason, beyond his own personal beefs, to join Snoke and the First Order. Think about it: Ben grew up with a front-row seat to the chaotic clusterfuck of dumbassery that was the New Republic. If Snoke told him that billions of dumb people might suddenly have the Force, and that only he can stop this, would he not sign up immediately? That’s like his worst nightmare. He already feels persecuted for his strength or his specialness or whatever Snoke told him. Add in the fear that democracy’s worst flaws might soon be enacted on a cosmic scale, and it makes total sense why he’d become a zealot for Snoke’s cause.

If Kylo knew everything Snoke knew, then his decision to kill Snoke instead of Rey takes on new significance. It would mean that he turned down his chance to become the only Force-user in the galaxy. Well, give or take one. He probably suspected by then that Snoke never intended to share power and that he wouldn’t get to stay king of the universe for very long. Nevertheless, when he asks Rey to join him instead of murdering her right after they’ve taken out those guards, he effectively turns down that chance  _again_ , this time freely, when nothing prevents him from  _actually_  becoming king of the universe. So, here’s what I think: Kylo still doesn’t believe anyone but the best, strongest, most special people in the galaxy should have the Force (or any power at all, really) but Rey has shown him that everything he knows about the dark and the light—that they will always conflict, that one must always dominate the other—is wrong. When he holds out his hand to his equal in the light, he sees possibilities beyond the old dogma that kept the Jedi and the Sith in a deadlock. He has learned that his compassion for Rey, and hers for him, wasn’t weakness at all, that in fact it was stronger than Snoke. So who knows what else Snoke was wrong about? When Kylo imagines him and Rey ruling the galaxy, he’s imagining some kind of harmony or truce, some kind of balance between the dark side and the light that he could never imagine before. But because he’s only halfway there, Rey turns him down, and that momentary possibility passes by for now. Dark and light are opposed again, this time in perfect equilibrium with no way for either to give ground.

So what can Kylo do now? He’s basically got two choices: force himself to kill the only person he cares about, or give up and die. Or Rey could give him a third option. Here’s my prediction: those Jedi books will help her figure out what Snoke’s plan was and what Kylo plans to do now. She’ll also learn that killing Kylo won’t resolve anything—it’ll just ensure that the same battle gets fought over and over again until someone finally balances the Force. And how do you balance the Force? The books won’t say, so she’ll have to work it out. Then she’ll have to convince Kylo to join her—and her ordinary, unspecial, rabble-rousing friends.

## TO SUM UP

So that’s my theory: Snoke knew a secret about the Force that nobody else knew, that if the dark and light sides of the Force could truly be balanced with neither in ascendence over the other, then everybody could have the Force. As long as the two sides remain in conflict, access to the Force is limited. So Snoke planned to restrict that access all the way down to himself by eliminating all the Force-users on both sides except for one powerful dark-sider who would act as a “vessel” in which the ascendence of dark over light would live on eternally. Oh and Snoke also had to make sure nobody else learned what he knew. That last part was why Luke posed a threat. That first part was why he needed Kylo, and (maybe) he would have sealed the whole deal by destroying Kylo’s mind and possessing him.


	2. Appendix: Snoke and the First Order

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Additional thoughts about who/what Snoke was, his relationship to the First Order, and the differences between the First Order and the Empire.

When Snoke’s strengths are described, there’s a lot of emphasis on his powers of sight. He’s great at seeing hidden or faraway things—which is how he helped the imperial remnant. Palpatine had gathered some data on the Unknown Regions, but his observatories couldn’t see far enough, and Snoke could. Or at least his master navigator Attendants could. So whether or not he’s the same species as them, I’m thinking Snoke has the same kind of brain as them: he “navigates” future events the way they navigate space. But he can’t do it without the Force. You could almost say that Snoke uses the Force as an optical technology. He’s surrounded by references to sight-augmenting devices—for instance, his Attendants have poor eyesight and wear lenses to see. They have also built an optical device called the oculus that Snoke keeps in his throne room, which seems to be a kind of telescope. Which is appropriate, because when the throne room’s red curtain burns down, we discover that the room is a glass hemisphere—an observatory.

But it’s an observatory that has been deliberately disabled—and actually, the oculus seems to be designed to  _limit_  sight. The curtain hides the stars and the events going on outside the ship—it hides the larger picture from anyone in Snoke’s presence, leaving the oculus as the only way to see outside. When Rey looks into it, she only sees the scene that Snoke believes will destroy her hope. So Snoke’s superior sight depends on making sure other people see badly. After all, he manipulates people primarily through illusion. When he appears to Kylo and Hux in TFA, he makes himself look fifty feet tall. He surrounds himself with an Emperor-esque aura of power, but it’s far more self-conscious and calculated than anything Palpatine ever did. In short, his major political tool is propaganda, which is why he’s a “supreme leader” and not an “emperor”—he’s a totalitarian dictator who stays in power not by styling himself as a deity but by controlling information and knowing more than his rivals. Last but not least: when he manipulates Kylo and Rey, he does so by making them  _see_  each other rather than, like, merge minds or something—correctly predicting that both of them will see what they want to see and not what’s true. (But Snoke ultimately makes the same mistake. He gets so confident he can see all that he decides he doesn’t need to keep looking and closes his eyes at the exact wrong moment.)

But let’s get into Snoke versus Palpatine more:

In the  _Aftermath_  novels, we learn about Palpatine’s secret plan: the Contingency, a giant self-destruct button on the Empire that a designated person will push in the event of Palpatine’s death. He’s offended by the idea of his Empire outliving him—him, the Emperor, whom the Empire was made to serve! So he chooses an orphan called Gallius Rax from Jakku (where he has built one of his secret observatories) and grooms him from childhood to press the button when the time comes. The button will destroy Jakku and take out what remains of the Imperial and New Republican forces while allowing a tiny remnant of Palpatine’s most loyal officers to escape into the Unknown Regions, where they will rebuild the Empire in a new place.

But, you say, what happened to the Empire not deserving to outlive its Emperor? There isn’t total agreement on where Palpatine himself will be in this reborn Empire. On the eve of the Contingency, we learn that Palpatine’s fanatical priest Tashu believes the Contingency will bodily resurrect Palpatine, but Rax does not:

> Tashu’s view is that the dark side is all, that Palpatine was the Master not just of the Empire but of everyone and everything, and that through all of this, the Dark Lord will be reborn.
> 
> Good. Let him believe that.

It’s unclear whether Palpatine was hoping for actual resurrection or merely the perpetuation of his will and legacy. But Rax has his own ideas that have little to do with Tashu’s or Palpatine’s:

> The Empire is dead.
> 
> But the Empire can live again under Rax.

Rax doesn’t take the Force seriously, and he certainly doesn’t believe Palpatine will somehow be going with them to the Unknown Regions, because he doesn’t think the Empire needs  _the_ Emperor at all. Rax can step into his role just as easily.

So Rax, first custodian of Palpatine’s wishes, has already distorted them. Then it happens again. Rax triggers the Contingency, but it doesn’t go off cleanly; Grand Admiral Sloane interrupts him and prevents him from destroying Jakku, so the imperial forces survive to surrender to the New Republic instead of wiping everything the Emperor built off the map. Already, Palpatine’s plan for total destruction has failed, which will taint the purity of the Empire’s resurrection. Rax at least convinces Sloane to guide the imperial remnant into the Unknown Regions in his place—but Sloane has even less interest Palpatine’s legacy than Rax had. She knows the Contingency was designed to extend Palpatine’s will beyond his death, and like Rax, she doesn’t intend to honor that will, which she believes was fundamentally corrupt:

> _If there is a chance to rebuild the Empire, shouldn’t I take it?_  Couldn’t she make it better? In her own image? She felt the promise of a frontier nation born of loyalty and order and not given over to the backstabbing and incest of the Empire that Palpatine created and Gallius Rax destroyed. They are pioneers in this space. They are the first outside the charted limits of the galaxy.
> 
> She realized:  _It can be mine, if only I am willing to take it._
> 
> Soon, they will be at their destination.
> 
> And soon, it will be hers to take.

A short time later, she founds the political entity that will replace the Empire:

> “It’s time to start over,” she says to Hux. “That is our first order. To begin again. And to get it right, this time.”
> 
> “Yes, of course, Grand Admiral. Anything you need. Glory be to Grand Admiral Sloane.”
> 
> “No,” she says. “Glory goes only to the Empire.”
> 
> _My Empire_ , she thinks.

So Rax and Sloane both secretly think that the Empire can be improved, that Palpatine was merely holding it back—but Sloane still anchors her political capital in an idea of “the Empire” that ultimately draws its security from Palpatine’s power and charisma. His death leaves other imperials free to  _use_  him to make  _themselves_ powerful.

Each subsequent First Order leader learns, however, that borrowed power is fundamentally different from whatever power Palpatine had. What makes the First Order different from the Empire? It doesn’t need an Emperor. Each of its leaders continues the fiction that they serve the Emperor’s legacy while secretly believing they’re in control now. But the Empire as the First Order has taken on a life of its own, has become an entity that serves only itself. The “Emperor” is a cipher, an image made by the Empire to gaze at itself, and while Rax and Sloane both believed they could shape that image into their own, they couldn’t, because a Supreme Leader isn’t like an Emperor at all. A Supreme Leader can be replaced. I mean, at the end of  _Aftermath,_  the First Order hasn’t even been  _founded_ yet and there has already been a regime change—which sets the tone for the kind of political entity it will be.

Snoke understands all of this perfectly, but he thinks he’s the exception. He doesn’t delude himself that he’s a second Palpatine but he knows the value of making otherpeople  _think_  he is. He also knows a totalitarian leader needs to anticipate and eliminate threats to stay in power, but to do this indefinitely, they need virtual omniscience. And Snoke believes he has that, thanks to the reach of his knowledge that comes from the Force. Given that advantage, he assumes the only true threat to him would be other people with the Force. So if he can ensure that he alone possesses that weapon, he will have power truly without limit, becoming a new Emperor if not in name then in fact.

So that’s how the First Order is new: it’s a desacralized Empire, an Empire with a hollow center, and although each new leader thinks it will be better without Palpatine’s spiritual mumbo-jumbo, his death changes the dynamics of power forever. Even Snoke, who  _might even be as powerful as Palpatine_ , doesn’t see the Force as a foundation of real authority and treats it merely as an instrument of political will.

There’s one last mysterious passage in  _Aftermath_ , though, that I’m still puzzling over. It’s Rax contemplating Palpatine’s plans—his delusions, really:

> Before Palpatine’s demise at the hands of the rebels, the computers finished their calculations, finally finding a way through the unknown. The Emperor was convinced that something waited for him out there—some origin of the Force, some dark presence formed of malevolent substance. He said he could feel the waves of it radiating out now that the way was clear. The Emperor called it a signal—conveniently one that only he could hear. Even his greatest enforcer, Vader, seemed oblivious to it, and Vader also claimed mastery over the dark Force, did he not? Rax believed Palpatine had gone mad. What he was “receiving” was nothing more than his own precious wishes broadcast back to himself—an echo of his own devising. He believed that something lay beyond, and so that became a singular obsession. (When you believe in magic, it is easy to see all the universe as evidence of it.)

So,  _was_  he deluded? Or was he sensing something real? If he was, was it Snoke? And if it was Snoke, does that make Snoke some kind of “origin of the Force”?? He’s certainly malevolent. And we can see why he’d want to send Palpatine a “signal”: to lure the imperial remnant to him. But…origin? Of the Force??

Snoke certainly makes no such claims about himself. He says in the TLJ novel that “the galaxy’s knowledge of the Force had come from those long-abandoned, half-legendary star systems [in the Unknown Regions], and that great truths awaited rediscovery among them. Truths that Snoke had learned and made to serve his own ends.” The Unknown Regions might contain an origin of some kind, but Snoke isn’t it. He merely finds it first.

So yeah, I guess we still don’t know who or what Snoke was.


	3. Appendix: Luke

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Additional thoughts about Luke’s despair and philosophy of the Force .

The TLJ novel tells us that Luke was the first real threat to Snoke’s plans. Instead of sticking around to found a new Jedi Order as Snoke had predicted/hoped, he went off in search of lost Force wisdom, the “origins” of the Jedi’s beliefs. Maybe this wisdom was known by the first Jedi, or maybe it predated the Jedi altogether, who knows. Either way, it’s pretty clear Luke was searching for something specific: what the dark and light sides really are, and how to put them in their proper relation. In other words, how to bring balance to the Force.

Here’s my reasoning. Like Palpatine, Luke knew he stood at the end of an era—the long war between the Jedi and the Sith—and that to end that war for good, he needed to go back to a time before it, to rediscover what had been forgotten in the conflict. This primordial wisdom would teach him what the latter-day Jedi had done wrong—how, for instance, they could have allowed the rise of Darth Sidious, the creation of Darth Vader, and the destruction of the Republic. As he tells Rey in TLJ, the conflict between Jedi and the Sith was a self-perpetuating cycle for which the Jedi were equally to blame. So when he set off on his quest, he was probably seeking a perspective on the dark side that his modern Jedi training couldn’t offer, some alternative to fighting and resisting and pushing away the dark side. Because the Jedi rejected the dark side, they didn’t understand it and couldn’t deal with it effectively, as demonstrated by how easily Sidious blindsided them. Most importantly, their beliefs demanded that Luke kill his own father. Vader’s return to the light showed Luke a way beyond the dark-versus-light paradigm he’d been taught, and he must have wanted to learn more—maybe even found a new Jedi Order based on a reformed system of beliefs. But then Snoke came along and tempted him into founding that new Order too soon—ensuring that this new Order would have all the same problems as the old one.

This explains something I wondered about at first: why Snoke wanted Luke to rebuild the Jedi and then have Ben destroy it. It seemed a rather byzantine way to drive Luke into exile, if that was Snoke’s goal. But Snoke had another goal: to repeat the old conflict and complete it in his favor. He’d have a new Jedi Order built exactly on the blueprints of the old one, with Kylo as a “second Vader” to destroy it again, this time once and for all. Then there would truly be no Jedi and no Sith. There would only be Kylo, the heir of both Jedi and Sith in whom the light side had been permanently subjugated to the dark. Kylo would be the sole bearer of that ancient conflict, having been both the one to end it and the one who continues to embody it. And that, in a sense, would preserve and immortalize it.

The ironic thing is, once Luke found the First Jedi Temple, Snoke became terrified that he might have learned enough to reform the Jedi Order for real. But Luke hadn’t. In fact, the wisdom he wanted was probably in those books—the books he never got around to reading, because by then he’d given up, derailed by his failure with Ben just as Snoke had planned. Luke reverts to the standard Jedi belief that the dark side inevitably corrupts; all he has added to this dogma is that the light side unwittingly helps it along. So as far as he’s concerned, both need to go. The Force is just dangerous, period. So the Jedi can’t be reformed, they can only be destroyed. (Yoda suggests in TLJ that the Jedi need to be destroyed in  _order_  to be reformed. But of course Luke won’t be the one to do that.)

So in a way, Luke and Snoke wind up strangely aligned. Luke has arrived at the conclusion that  _nobody_  should use the Force, or at least that whenever anybody does, things go wrong. Snoke and Kylo believe only  _they_  should use the Force, because whenever anybody else does, things go wrong. But Luke gets stuck when he assumes that the Force will always be concentrated in a few extremely powerful individuals who can’t help but go around wrecking the galaxy. Snoke, of course, sees this scenario as a good thing, as long as that number is very small (if not one) and acts with a single will.

So Luke and Kylo get stuck in similar places: Kylo believes that only a few people  _should_  have the Force, while Luke assumes they inevitably will. Neither of them can imagine a peaceful world in which the Force is for everybody.


	4. Appendix: Leia

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Additional thoughts about Leia's role in the Snoke-Kylo-Luke arc, which remains the most closely concealed aspect of this storyline.

I mentioned that Leia, as one of the last major Force-sensitives in the galaxy and Darth Vader’s other heir, is a wildcard, and we hear almost nothing about how she figures into Snoke’s plan. In the TLJ novel, he only mentions her as an influence on Ben, which is odd. Why does he never set his sights on  _her_  even though she’s a direct descendent of Darth Vader and literally Luke’s twin, his “equal”? Is it because she has Force potential but never developed it? Does he think Ben has absorbed that unused potential somehow? Or does he just decide not to fuck with her because she’s older and harder to manipulate than a baby?

I mean, Leia would be a great choice if Snoke just wanted someone with plenty of light and darkness in them. Like Anakin, Leia has a major dark side; there are lots of moments in the tie-in novels that say things like “she would burn down the galaxy if she thought it was right.” If that isn’t a true collision of dark with light, I don’t know what is. But she’d be impossible to control, even for Snoke. So maybe he takes Ben as a substitute for her? Or—this seems more likely—she has made her choices and gone the way she’s going to go, whereas Ben is still pure potential. That’s what Snoke reallywants—someone who is unformed, who’s still a coin spinning on its edge. I’m convinced that Snoke’s interest in Ben has to do with  _probability_ somehow, that by controlling the outcome of this truly indeterminate tipping point, he can somehow boost the probability that his own plans will succeed. But I don’t know quite how that would work.

And it still doesn’t explain how Snoke fit Leia into those plans. In the TFA novel, he has a tantalizing line:

> “The elements align, Kylo Ren. You alone are caught in the winds of the storm. Your bond is not just to Vader, but to Skywalker himself. Leia…”

Where was that ellipsis going? Does he simply mean that Leia is Ben’s mother and thus his connection to Luke? (I think this is the first we’re hearing of who Ben’s parents are.) But it’s funny how Snoke just leaves her name hanging, as if she is a factor but he’s not going to tell us how, or maybe doesn’t even know. 

I dunno. What do you guys think? Leia is obviously at the center of the war and politics plot, but what role does she play in the Force-balancing plot? (Might she in fact be the point where those two plots merge?)


End file.
